The first and by far the most significant interpretation of Marx’s doctrine was realized in the Soviet Union by Vladimir Ilich Lenin and developed by Joseph Stalin and was entirely authoritarian. According to Marx and Engels, the revolution could occur in Russia only after the bourgeois phase of production had “contradicted” the tsarist order, but Lenin was determined to take advantage of the opportunities provided by the upheaval of World War I to settle accounts directly with the “accursed heritage of serfdom.” In the Russian Revolution of 1917, he engineered a coup that secured the support of the peasantry ... (100 of 19,161 words)